


First Love – The Week Beast Was Gone

by bocje_ce_ustu



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Modern: Still Have Powers, Angst with a Happy Ending, Chess, Gen, Grumpy Old Men, M/M, Old Married Couple, Only the Cat Knows AU, Pets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-15
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:01:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21796522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bocje_ce_ustu/pseuds/bocje_ce_ustu
Summary: Charles's everyday life gets turned upside down the day his beloved cat and only confidant disappears.An "Only the Cat Knows (Hatsukoi - Otosan, Chibi ga inakunarimashita)" AU.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 47
Collections: Secret Mutant Exchange 2019





	First Love – The Week Beast Was Gone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kaydeefalls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaydeefalls/gifts).



> Written for the prompt: "Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier, Armando Muñoz/Alex Summers, Raven | Mystique/Angel Salvadore, Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr, Armando Muñoz, Alex Summers, Raven | Mystique, Angel Salvadore, Alternate Universe - Fusion  
> Any of the relationships listed, no pressure whatsoever to include the ones you don't want to write. Any and all other characters also welcome. I love everyone in this bar, basically.  
> If you so choose, consider this your fusion AU free for all. I really love fusion AUs of any kind. Keep their mutant powers or ditch 'em, both are fine. I don't even care if I know the other fandom or not. Or just random AU setting of your choice. Trying to make the canon movie continuity work gives me a headache, so AUs are my happy place. (Canon-divergence AUs also awesome, if that's your jam.)"
> 
> This is my modest tribute to the lovely Japanese movie "Hatsukoi - Otosan, Chibi ga inakunarimashita" ("First Love - Dad, Kitty's gone", internationally known as "Only the Cat Knows").  
> You don't need to be familiar with it to read this fic, but if you like this fic even a tiny bit, you'll absolutely love the movie.

  
“I think... I’m going to divorce your father.”

Three heads whip around to look at him, and even the screaming infant in Alex’s arms stops crying. Charles feels the first ripples of confusion crease the general flatlining of shock, and braces himself for the eventual eruption of disbelief with the best smile he has. His knees are cold, but now might be a little too late to ask for a blanket.

But that’s not how it began, now, isn’t it?

***

“It looks delicious.”

“Mh.” Erik eyes the pot critically, stirring the sauce another couple of times before turning off the stove.

“Definitely my sandwiches can’t compete,” Charles says, but his joke falls on deaf ears.

Erik drains the pasta, pours it in the sauce pot and then sets about making portions.

“So how was your day?”

“Alright.” Erik sets the cutlery down with surgical precision even as his hands, more wrinkled but no less beautiful than when they first met, have a slight tremble in placing their dishes onto the dinner table. “Still have to find a worthy opponent.”

He doesn’t looks up with a glint in his eye as he would have once. His gaze flits somewhere beyond Charles’s shoulder, before dropping again onto the plate, but Charles doesn’t need to look to know where their chessboard is gathering dust, in the corner of the dining room, in the shadow of a cupboard.

He’s been picking up splinters for weeks.

A meow interrupts his thoughts, making him break into a smile.

“Hank!”

The cat gazes up at him with his round yellow eyes, gauging the distance to make a leap.

“Don’t let him—” Hank plops down in Charles’s lap and Erik huffs. “You spoil him.”

“He’s a very well-behaved cat, of course I spoil him.” Charles scratches Hank behind his ears, revelling in the delighted purr and the warmth emanating from his soft body. “Isn’t that right, sweetie?” he coos.

“And it’s unhygienic,” counters Erik, viciously digging his fork into his pasta.

“Don’t listen to him,” Charles whispers to the cat, mock-covering his fluffy ears.

Erik only huffs again, stuffing his mouth to stop himself from talking. Not that they talk much these days anyway.

Charles keeps a hand into Hank’s fur and eats with the other.

***

“There you are!”

Hank trots into the kitchen, darts a gaze at his empty bowl and then levels his yellow eyes at Charles, unfazed.

“Now now, have a little patience. You can help me with lunch in the meantime.”

Hank looks insistently at his bowl, and then again at Charles, not buying it in the least.

“I know, I know. Just a minute.”

Hank seems unconvinced, but the smell of food cooking must do its trick, because he decides to sit on his haunches and wait, following the proceedings with almost scientific interest.

They eat in silence, or at least in relative silence – Charles digging into a new instant soup he’s already mentally adding to their next shopping list, and Hank munching on his kibble with gusto – but it’s a companionable one. There’s no tension, no feeling of something missing from the scene, at least not if Charles ignores the bag with Erik’s sandwich in it, silently waiting on the table.

He picks it up as soon as he’s cleaned up, puts on his coat, grabs his keys and locks up, remembering to leave the kitchen back door open for Hank’s rounds of the neighbourhood.

The way to the chess club is both refreshing and enervating. There’s something comforting in the lively buzz of tens, hundreds of people going about their lives, their wishes, fears, feelings brushing against him, but his head tires sooner these days, and anyway he only ever wishes he could listen in to one person’s wishes, fears, feelings.

The doorbell chimes as he enters. Erik is in his usual spot near the far wall, relentlessly hacking into the bold yet inexpert resistance of a young girl with ever-moving wings on her back.

“Here.” Charles hands him out the bag with the sandwich. “We ran out of turkey, I’m sorry.”

Erik corks a brow, looking at him strangely, and takes the bag with a murmured thanks.

“So… I’m off. Have fun.”

“See you later,” Erik says, distractedly, eyes already set back onto the game.

The girl smiles at him cordially, and he nods a greeting, going out the way he came.

The afternoon drags between one cup of tea and the other, Hank moving from his spot in the sun to the sofa, opting for grooming on Charles’s open _Annals of Mutant Genetics_ as Charles reviews the article he’s supposed to publish next week.

After a while, he feels something wet and warm nose its way under his arm, and he moves to accommodate Hank on his legs. “Today seems to last forever…” Charles muses, treading a hand in his fur as he keeps going through the draft of his article. “But we manage quite alright between the two of us, don’t we, Hank? Yeah, we’re alright.” Hank peers up at him from half-closed lids and gives a big, adorable yawn that uncovers his pointy teeth.

“Oh, Hank… what would I do without you…”

***

“Hank! Hank! Come on in, it’s your favourite!”

Charles empties a tuna and carrot mix can in the little yellow bowl marked BEAST in the kitchen corner and rinses the can, waiting for the telltale tapping of paws on the floor. He glances towards the corridor leading to the hall and bedrooms, then to the kitchen back door opening on the garden.

He’s probably still doing the rounds, he ponders, and sets about making lunch for himself and a sandwich to bring Erik at the chess club. His favourite, turkey on rye.

***

By the end of the day, Hank still hasn’t shown up. The cat food in the bowl has congealed into some poultice, unpalatable even by cat standards, Charles wagers, and considers throwing it out but ultimately he can’t. Hank could show up anytime, and then he’d surely be hungry.

He makes sure to leave the kitchen back door slightly ajar.

Erik turns up around eight, seemingly so bored he doesn’t even complain about the half-burnt steak. Charles had gone out to look for Hank in the neighbourhood, forgetting it on the stove.

Charles is about to tell Erik about Hank, but then Erik stands, collects the plates and vanishes into the kitchen, leaving Charles alone with a restlessness he can’t quite place.

***

“Dad? With a girl?” Alex’s eyes widen comically, and Armando has to lower the glass in his hand so that his husband doesn’t drop him. How Raven manages to call every single emergency meeting at his and Alex’s house, knowing how her brother gets, fails him.

“Are you sure you saw it right?” he asks, cautious. “He doesn’t seem the type.”

“Ha!” Alex bursts out, looking at him in something dreadfully akin to compassion. “You don’t know him! He might have been the prim, proper Professor with you guys, but our father’s the biggest flirt both sides of the Atlantic.”

“He was hugging a young woman in the park near our house, the other day,” Raven confirms. “There’s no way I haven’t seen it right.”

“Maybe he was just comforting her,” Armando says, tentatively.

“Oh, and she was comforting him back, right?” Raven remarks, and by her outraged tone she’s clearly playing back the scene inside her head.

“Did you see who she was?” Alex cuts in.

Raven shakes her head. “She was wearing a hat and… like, some sort of uniform. Like that of a working company.”

“Oh my God, I can’t believe it.” Alex drops his face into Armando’s shoulder, sighing dramatically. “Now what do we do?”

“You could try talking to him, try to clear things up a bit first.”

Alex raises his head and looks at Raven with pleading eyes.

“What? Do you expect _me_ to talk to him?”

“I shoot plasma beams when I’m nervous.”

Raven rolls her eyes.

***

Charles remembers the day they took him in like it were yesterday.

He was walking with Raven along the path in the local park, dead leaves crushing under their feet, when there was a sudden rustle from one of the bushes on their left, followed right after by a high-pitched shriek.

And then a blue blur tumbled down the bush, and Charles’s first instinct was to put himself between Raven and the danger. Too late, because his little girl had already dashed through the grass to inspect the tiny, fuzzy creature that looked every bit like a kitten, if not for the fact that…

“It’s blue, Dad! Like me!” cried Raven, ecstatically.

“Yes, I can see that, darling. Now careful, it might bite you if it’s scared.”

Raven crouched down and made her way carefully to the kitten, who looked at her with big, watchful eyes as she attempted a tentative pat on its fur. Charles walked closer still, ready to sweep his daughter up if the animal were to attack, but when after a few pats Raven tried to pick it up, the kitten just went with her, its little claws hinged on Raven’s coat not to fall down again.

“Dad, can we keep it? Can we keep it?”

Charles looked at his daughter, at the blue ball of fur experimentally purring in her tiny arms, and sighed.

“Papa would disapprove.”

Raven flashed him a full-toothed grin and kept walking in front of him, holding the little blue bundle of limbs and fur close to her chest, aglow.

But that’s not how it began either.

***

“Charles, what have you done?”

“Why, I have done many things today, dear. I revised my paper, vacuumed, showered, made lunch…”

“Must we do this every time?” Raven huffs. “You perfectly know what I mean, you knew as soon as I walked through the door. Did you cheat on Erik? Is that why you two aren’t getting along these days?”

Charles’s shoulders sag visibly, and he gives her a wry smile. “Do you really think so poorly of me?”

“Maybe I do. Did you?”

“What makes you think I did?”

Raven pointedly thinks about his father tenderly embracing a random younger woman in the park, and Charles gives a soft _oh_. And another.

And then he bursts out laughing, and laughs, and laughs till he’s crying.

“That was Moira from the Lost Pet Finders,” he explains at last, wiping tears away from his eyes. “Hank hasn’t been home for almost five days now.”

“Beast? Beast is gone?” Raven’s hands drop from her sides.

“We tried all of his usual routes along the neighbourhood, through the grove by the riverside, in the park… There’s been no sign of him and I...”

“Beast is gone.” Raven repeats, a dreadful sense of emptiness overwhelming her. Strangely, Armando’s words come back to her and she feels so small and so dumb. Beast has disappeared and the first thing she thought was Charles was cheating on Erik with some random woman.

“He might still… At least, they said…” Another tear rolls down Charles’s eye, and this time he wipes furiously at it. “I don’t know, I don’t know.” He takes a deep ragged breath, forcibly steeling himself again, and reaches over to the kitchen table. “Could you bring this to your father, dear?”

He hands her the bagged sandwich, and Raven knows the conversation is over.

***

“Erik, what have you done?”

Raven has never truly exited her rebellious phase, dramatically renouncing her family relations in order to, _quote_ , walk her own path, _unquote_. She’s all her father, Erik thinks proudly.

“Good morning to you too.” Erik takes the bagged sandwich she’s handing him – turkey on rye, _again_ – without taking his eyes off the game. This kid is getting better.

“Beast has disappeared.”

“So what? Do you think I ate him?”

He looks at the girl on the other side of the chessboard, trying for a conspiratorial smirk, but she’s already returning a smile at Raven as she eyerolls in her direction. That turn of events seems to distract his daughter for a moment, but then Raven gets back on track.

“You never liked him, that’s for sure.”

“ _He_ never liked _me_. He only liked Charles.” _And you_ , he thinks, but somehow that detail seems irrelevant. It’s been so long since the last of their kids left home, his image of Beast is that of a plump ball of fluff flicking his tail at him in defiance from his perch on Charles’s legs, and spreading tons of long blue fur all around the house only to win soft coos and affectionate scratches and premium quality cat food.

“You could try putting out posters,” says the girl helpfully. Erik told her countless times to keep her focus on the game if she wants to beat him. All in all, though, it might be pointless now that she’s set her eyes on his daughter.

Erik remembers how that feels.

“I might do just that, yeah” Raven says with a brilliant smile, and then turns the evil eye back on Erik.

“And you could make at least an effort to be kind to dad these days. You know how lonely he gets, with you here all day and only his books to keep him company.”

“I know,” Erik says, even though he doesn’t, not really. For all he knows, for all he cares, this is how Charles would rather spend his time, away from anyone and anything daring to contradict him.

Stupid. Stupid and naïve. Probably that stupid cat of his had dared contradict him too, and then decided it wasn’t worth his while and left for good. It that’s the case, then there’s at least one thing Erik can appreciate about him, after all.

***

“I’m sorry about Beast,” mutters Erik that evening, looking into his plate.

 _Hank, his name is Hank_ , Charles thinks.

“So you noticed,” he says, gritting his teeth. “It’s been five days.”

“He’s old, you know. What is he, now, fourteen? Fifteen? Maybe he ate something strange, or fell ill and went into hiding somewhere. They do that, when they…”

“Hank’s not dead!” Charles cries out, almost startling himself with how shrill his voice sounds. “Though I’m sure you’d like that. You’ve never wanted him. Well then, rejoice. The hellcat sure looks like a goner now.” And he wheels back from the table, leaving his plate half-empty, before tears of pain and anger roll down his cheeks.

***

“Here’s the salt,” says Raven in lieu of a greeting, handing him the sandwich bag which, strangely enough, doesn’t smell like it contains turkey on rye.

“If it’s some new meme, I don’t get it.”

Angel, before him, stifles a laugh, midday sunlight catching on her translucent wings. Raven just scowls.

“It means I’m tired of passing the salt between you two. Couldn’t you solve this, you know, by talking, like adults do?”

“I tried talking, your father screamed at me I was wrong. Like he always does.”

 _Maybe because you are?_ , Raven’s face says, but what she tells him is, “Maybe don’t tell him Beast is lying dead in some ditch next time.” She looks heavenward, and then something catches her eye on the wall behind them. Her eyes narrow in suspicion.

“Someone removed the poster I’d made about Beast.”

Erik gives a distracted glance at the sandwich lying beside the chessboard, feigning indifference as he wonders if Angel is going to rat him out. He moves a pawn, in a move he hates while he does it. The match is as good as lost. That’s maybe the fit of pique that makes him talk.

“You should all stop giving him false hopes. That’s not good for him.”

“You’re…!” Raven takes a deep breath, clearly making an effort to keep her voice low as not to draw unwanted attention. “You’re a heartless bastard, you know?”

Erik ignores his fuming daughter in favour of biting into his sandwich, which is even more flavourless than usual. As he munches through it, though, a strange feeling pervades him. There was something he was supposed to do. Something… Shit.

“What time is it?”

“Twelve twenty-two,” Angel informs him.

Fuck, he’s going to be late. “I’ve got to go. I’m sorry, Angel, we’ll have to continue our match another time.”

Angel arches a brow, and her puzzled gaze goes from him to Raven, who is equally confused.

“Sure.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s gotten into him,” he hears Raven apologise as he rushes out of the club. “Do you mind if I join you?”

***

They don’t talk for two days after their fight, or their Erik being Erik and Charles being Charles, or whatever it is they are now that they don’t talk like they used to anymore. Charles only knows that he should be used to silence by now, and yet it still weights on him like lead, and there’s not even Hank to save him from the bottomless solitude that his life has become.

He finishes his paper and sends it to his editor, makes lunch, does the shopping, plunges into his reading list, and ultimately cleans the house until it’s spotless.

He finds a lost pawn under one of the libraries, a slight dent on the otherwise smooth and round top, and that gives him the courage to pick up the chessboard in the corner and dust it up as well.

As he puts the pawn inside, he counts the pieces. There’s still one missing, the white king – well, two, but the black knight Erik broke during their last match doesn’t count.

Charles’s fingertips linger on the damaged pieces one after the other. He remembers the rage, remembers the silence that followed. The void, where before there was Erik, his wishes, his fears, his feelings.

Charles can’t remember what he’d said exactly, before the rage, the silence, the void. He thinks it was something inconsequential, or something he could have said in any of their discussions of politics, rights or values. In any of the debates, or rather heated arguments, they invariably got themselves into once they sat around a chessboard.

Except that had been the last argument, the last match, in months.

 _You can hear everything, Charles_ , Erik had said, sending the pieces scattering to the floor, _but what good does it do you if you can’t listen?_

He places the chessboard back into its shadowy corner, at least until the last piece turns up, and decides to go and look for Hank again.

He goes in the hall to retrieve his coat, but when he does, one of Erik’s coats falls down, and as he picks it up a slip of paper flits through the air and into his lap.

A receipt for two coffees, in the café across the street from Charles’s old campus. The date printed on it is yesterday.

***

It began with a coffee, as it often does.

Charles was beginning to consider kicking a viable option to convince the automated distributor to either drop the damned chocolate bar or relinquish his money, with Magda holding a hand in front of her mouth to hide the grin Charles felt building on her face anyway. Was it so unbecoming of a college professor to start kicking a distributor in the middle of the hall of the university he was holding a conference in?

He would have discovered it soon, had it not been for an arm reaching over his shoulder and two long fingers tapping on the side of the evil machine, surrendering it to comply to Charles’s request.

“Here you go.”

It wasn’t really the gesture that did the trick, more like something shining brightly in the mind behind the face that now smiled at him, smug as if he’d just hung the moon in the sky and was waiting for Charles to notice – which Charles was very much noticing, if Magda silently snickering beside him was any indication. He was noticing alright, not only the mind that had suddenly lighted up the entire hall, but the grey eyes and thin lips and long fingers and…

The simmering frustration from the queue behind him snapped him back into focus.

“Amazing,” he says, bending to retrieve the chocolate bar from the dispenser. “Can I offer you something as a thank you?”

The stranger’s – _Erik’s_ , Charles knows, instantly – smug expression morphs into something softer, a tinge of warmth gracing his cheeks.

“A coffee?”

***

If it wasn’t for the shoes, Charles tells himself, he would have never consciously decided to make a fool of himself.

It’s been little over a week since Hank has disappeared, and he really doesn’t care if he looks like a fool.

So when he sees Erik step into his usual well-worn shoes in the hall, put on his good coat and drape his scarf around his neck as he walks to the front door, then walk back, step out of his shoes and into another pair, one a little more fancy that – Charles remembers – Erik had been wearing the last time they went out to dinner together, he knows he’s definitely going to do it.

The café near the university has changed many faces during the decades, but Charles still remembers their little round table on the patio on the back, under the shade of laurels. The fact that that part has now been converted into a parking garage makes it a little more bearable to be here for the reason he is.

He doesn’t really know what else he should have expected when, sitting at one of the tables outside, he feels a familiar mind join Erik at his table inside.

They talk for a long time, sometimes Magda’s hand reaching affectionately to cover Erik’s over the table, and Charles can’t hear a word of it.

He leaves when his coffee has grown cold.

***

Charles smiles, and convinces himself he isn’t dying a little inside as he hears everything his kids want to tell him and aren’t saying.

“I think it’s clear to you too by now that it would be pointless to continue a relationship that doesn’t bring joy to either me or your father.”

 _You’re seventy_ , Raven thinks, with as much disbelief as one would direct to a divorcing couple of centenarians.

“And it’s unfair of me to insist on keeping your father tied to me when his feelings clearly don’t lie here.”

“You mean…” Raven is agape, and Armando hurries to take little Sean from Alex’s arms when he looks like he could beam any of the paintings on the far wall.

***

“What does this mean?”

A communal rattle of cutlery and pans announces Erik’s arrival, only growing stronger as he storms in and slams the papers onto the kitchen table.

“I’m pretty sure it’s all written in English,” Charles deadpans, only wishing for this to be over as soon as possible.

“Are you serious? Charles, we’ve been together for forty years.”

The pain and disbelief in Erik’s voice do nothing to make Charles’s words come easier.

“You got tired of me, I didn’t.”

He slides the receipt across the table and watches Erik’s eyes widen in realization.

“You really… you really are something, you know?” Erik throws his hands in the hair, words failing him. “You think I’m cheating on you with Magda?”

Charles starts feeling increasingly stupid by the second, and he doesn’t know why. It must be the embarrassment, the disillusion, the nauseating fear that Erik might even try to deny. The hope he might.

“I think you’re tired of this,” he spreads his hands, gesturing at the walls surrounding them, “tired of us, and you want to get away. You can.”

The kitchen gives another echoing rattle.

“You’re so full of shit. Yes, yes, I want to get away.”

Charles’s heart plunges into his belly.

“I want to get away from your sanctimonious talk, from your short-sightedness, from your paper ideals…”

“Then go.” Charles’s voice breaks.

“But then I think about how you never fail to bring me lunch even when you’re angry at me, how you still lean into me at night, how I want to have another match with you, and I just can’t. I just can’t go.” He sees tears rolling down Erik’s eyes, and feels as if they’re rolling down his own as well. “I just wish you cared to listen to what I have to say as if it mattered.”

“But I do care. And everything you say to me… every single thing you say matters to me, Erik. I’ve been missing you so damn much.” And now he knows tears are streaking down his own face in earnest, but there’s a peculiar quality to the grief and sadness and hope he feels.

Somehow, the void is gone, and here is Erik, emotion barrelling and mind shining like the first day.

Erik leans into him, his mind wrapping around Charles’s as he wraps his arms around his body for the first time in what feels like an eternity.

“I’m sorry I did such a poor job of listening,” Charles sobs. “I want to get better.”

Erik kisses his temple. “I’m sorry I was such an asshole about Beast. I guess I resented him even more since we fought and you’d only speak with him, and then he disappeared and you couldn’t think of anything else, even though I was right there.” Charles gives him a sad smile, and caresses the wrinkles gracing Erik’s eyes. “I’m sorry I didn’t stop to think about your pain.”

Charles shakes his head. “You were right, though. An old cat, I should probably make peace with the possibility…”

“I hope he comes back home safe and sound, for you.”

Erik kisses him again, this time on the mouth, and Charles determinedly keeps him there until they’re both short of breath.

“There’s nothing between me and Magda, you know. I met her by chance the other day, and I… I don’t know… I missed our conversations, but I couldn’t just speak with you, I was so angry… Eventually she had to suffer through two conversations that were mostly rants about you, poor girl.” Erik sniffles, his mind going back to Magda’s face as she awkwardly patted his hand over the table.

“I miss our conversations,” Charles repeats, “I miss our matches too. I was so jealous about all the lucky people that got to play you at the chess club.”

“I have a disciple now.”

“Do you now?”

“She’s not as good as you, but she might be, one day. And you’ll probably see her around sooner than that.”

Erik shares an impression of Raven’s smiling face as she gestures over the chessboard, a lithe girl with butterfly wings grinning at her on the other side.

“You know,” Charles says, “I found the last missing pawn yesterday. There must still be a white king hiding somewhere, but I think we can manage. We have to find a replacement for the black knight anyway.”

Erik disentangles from him and rummages through his pocket. “You mean this one?”

In his hand lies a white king, the glaze running thin in some points but otherwise unharmed.

“You had it this whole time?”

There’s a light creak and low grumble in the background, but Charles is too distracted by the chess piece in Erik’s hand to look around for its source.

“I…” Erik clears his throat. “I would look at it and think about how you make me so angry all the time.”

Charles snorts, and then captures Erik’s lips before he can even think of pressing them into a pout.

The rumble in the background grows, and then morphs into a meow.

As they part, Charles shares an incredulous look with Erik. A moment later, they turn around to see Hank pointedly looking at his empty bowl and at them in turns.

And this is how it starts, again.


End file.
